Posted on Categories Discover Magazine
After a year of downtime to perform hardware upgrades, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is ready for action and will turn on its twin detectors, one in Washington state and the other in Louisiana, on April 1. This time, it will also be joined by the Virgo collaboration based out of Italy, and possibly also by the KAGRA detector in Japan later in the year. Combined with the hardware upgrades, scientists expect these updates to allow LIGO to spot more observations